he existing modes of school work may go on; but the lack of
inherent necessity in these school modes reflects itself in a feeling,
on the part of the child, that the moral discipline of the school is
arbitrary. Any conditions that compel the teacher to take note of
failures rather than of healthy growth give false standards and result
in distortion and perversion. Attending to wrong-doing ought to be an
incident rather than a principle. The child ought to have a positive
consciousness of what he is about, so as to judge his acts from the
standpoint of reference to the work which he has to do. Only in this way
does he have a vital standard, one that enables him to turn failures to
account for the future.

By saying that the moral training of the school is formal, I mean that
the moral habits currently emphasized by the school are habits which are
created, as it were, _ad hoc_. Even the habits of promptness,
regularity, industry, non-interference with the work of others,
faithfulness to tasks imposed, which are specially inculcated in the
school, are habits that are necessary simply because the school system
is what it is, and must be preserved intact. If we grant the
inviolability of the school system as it is, these habits represent
permanent and necessary moral ideas; but just in so far as the school
system is itself isolated and mechanical, insistence upon these moral
habits is more or less unreal, because the ideal to which they relate is
not itself necessary. The duties, in other words, are distinctly school
duties, not life duties. If we compare this condition with that of the
well-ordered home, we find that the duties and responsibilities that the
child has there to recognize do not belong to the family as a
specialized and isolated institution, but flow from the very nature of
the social life in which the family participates and to which it
contributes. The child ought to have the same motives for right doing
and to be judged by the same standards in the school, as the adult in
the wider social life to which he belongs. Interest in community
welfare, an interest that is intellectual and practical, as well as
emotional--an interest, that is to say, in perceiving whatever makes for
social order and progress, and in carrying these principles into
execution--is the moral habit to which all the special school habits
must be related if they are to be animated by the breath of life.

THE MORAL TRAINING FROM METHO